Modifying Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 to run on three immersive monitors

Graphic cards were definitely a thing back then... unless FS1 rendered to ANSI art?!

Yeah, I'm certain that lots of people bought FSX, so it always puzzled me that they didn't do anything about it as the years went by. Granted, FSX was truly crippled by terrible performance, and it really hasn't aged well. It doesn't even run all that well on today's hardware, more than a decade later.

That said, maybe DTG will do something with it.

>and the project will not move forward any more, after so many decades.

Lockheed Martin licensed ESP from Microsoft and develops it as Prepar3D.

There was also the series of "Action Replay" devices for doing this automatically in hardware. I still have an ISA one for PC.

There was a great blog post a while back posted here (I think it was a blog post) about a guy who was a summer intern way back when for a company that published cheat code books and he job was to use a device similar to that or an Action Replay device to find them, record them, name them and move on.

Imagination is why nobody complains about the graphics of back in the day. Or even games like Dwarf Fortress, UIs like Vim, etc. The hurdle is that getting into a game that take a step backwards in terms of graphics gets difficult.

I still crank up Jetfighter II in Dosbox when nostalgia grabs me.

To me the less detailed graphics are much more "readable" than the modern GPU powered stuff.

Actually the projection is correct, but the camera is not exactly at the center of projection, so it appears that the lines are bent across the monitor edges. However, if you place your head at the exact center of projection, they look correct. I'm actually doing three separate projections, instead of just stretching one image across three displays. The GoPro field of view was not able to capture everything, so I had to pull it back a bit, and so its not perfect. A spherical camera would have done a better job here.

There was also a parameter to use stereophonic sound if your sound card supported it (mine didn't), so you tell which side monster sounds were coming from! Mind-blowing at the time.

This was linked on /r/programming and I thought it'd interest some people here, but I'm not the post's author. I wish I'd even have thought of trying to make a nearly 30 years old piece of software across multiple monitors!

It only took me a few days, maybe 20 hours total? ... I started this back in January but it took me a while to capture the videos and write it up since I've been reworking the physical frame to make the monitors fit closer.

1/4 of the time was spent running GDB trying to find the memory locations and work out the encoding scheme.

1/4 of the time was spent getting familiar with DOSBox, building on Ubuntu, and syncing the data around via UDP.

1/4 of the time was spent trying to automate the start up so I didn't need to press a hundred keys manually to configure all the displays each time I restarted it.

1/4 of the remaining time was capturing nice videos and writing it all up :)

I've done hacks like this before ... back in 2000 I worked on the team that built ARQuake but we had source code http://www.tinmith.net/arquake/

You'd need to be able to offset the camera position per-instance, which I'm not sure the old X-Wing games can do. I mostly played Alliance, which I'm pretty certain cannot; it has several camera options, but I don't recall any that allow for arbitrary positioning. On the other hand, if you're interacting directly with the game's memory space rather than just its UI, that may not actually be an issue.

Assuming you can't reposition a camera, you could try offsetting the ship position on one of the instances, but then you'd probably have issues with the simulation states diverging - I suspect a big part of why it can be made to work with Flight Simulator is that the state of the aircraft itself is more or less the only thing that's actually being simulated, so you can manipulate it to a fare-thee-well without affecting anything else. Contrariwise, if TIE fighter shots hit the ship in your left-eye instance, but miss the ship in your right-, that'a a much harder problem to solve.

Haha, glad you noticed the C64 and 1541 :) That was my first computer :)

Yes, it was coming with the “Aircraft and Scenery Designer”.

http://fshistory.simflight.com/fsvault/msfs4.htm

Yes, you can hide the instruments. But then it changes the projection and then nothing lines up across the displays. You need to hide the instruments on all or none of the displays.

This should be possible with any emulator for old school systems, like 286 with DOS, C64, Atari, etc. All you need is the ability in the game to "look left" and "look right" somehow, and tune the field of view for correct projection. If the game can't do that, then it might not be possible.

Also, the hacks in the blog post won't work as well for anything newer than DOS, like Windows games, since there is an OS in the way and writing over memory locations gets a lot harder. You would need to approach the problem differently.

I built the set up in January to work with X-Plane 11, which I wrote up here: http://www.tinmith.net/wayne/blog/2017/01/immersive-flight-s...

But I wanted to see if it was possible get the original FS4 working on this, because it seemed quite impossible.